I'm always looking for ways to get things done a bit faster, and today we bring you what could very well be the ultimate sidebar. It's actually more like a personalized homepage, a sidebar, and an application launcher all rolled up into one. That sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it?

Remember in May when we wrote about Google’s new Mapplets? The developer preview is over and it’s now live! Mapplets are mini-webpages served inside an IFrame within Google Maps that allows users to create their own mapping mash-ups. According to Google, ever since the official Google Maps API was released in June 2005, over 50,000 Mashups have been created.

One of my biggest pet-peeves with Digg’s RSS feed is that they do not include a link to the original source. You have to click on the link to the news item on Digg, and then from Digg, click to view the original article. This problem has been solved for me with the use of DiggRess – an alternative RSS feed for Digg.

When Flickr meets Google maps, what do you get? A really cool mashup that shows you in real-time, geo-located Flickr photos. Flickrvision was just released yesterday and it’s created by the same person who made Twittervision, if you’re familiar with that.

There have been many startup services out there that introduced the concept of creating your own mashups using Google Maps.  One of those mashups that we’ve written about is called “Wayfaring” which was a great way to plan trips, or create a journal of a trip that you already took.

Yahoo!  recently launched a new services called Pipes, and in short, it's an "interactive feed aggregator and manipulator." By using it, you can "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant" Sounded interesting enough to me, so I thought I'd go check it out. Unfortunately when I went to go give it a try and create a new pipe, I got this message: